2. Harriet Anstruther's picture perfect farmhouse

When interior designer Harriet Anstruther took possession of her run-down Sussex farmhouse, she put her eclectic mark on it, while keeping its original features...

'Here is absolutely where the heart is,' Harriet Anstruther says, gesturing towards the wonky, flint-clad rear of her timber-framed house, with its catslide roof and stamp-size windows. 'There is nothing designer-y about it. The house is mostly filled with junk, but it is the most enormous luxury to escape from London to a place that doesn't have to serve multiple purposes.' Harriet is married to photographer Henry Bourne and has a 22-year-old daughter, Celestia. This is where they come to decompress as a family. 'As a house, it doesn't have to work very hard,' she says.

Ngoc Minh Mgo

Advertisement

During the week, Harriet runs a successful, multi-disciplinary design studio, working closely with clients to create playful, bold and glamorous interiors, from Mayfair town houses to country manors. She originally studied fine art, so her knowledge and appreciation of the art world provides her with boundless inspiration. But it's Harriet's more recent studies in interior architecture at the Inchbald School of Design that underpin her designs with an understanding of how a building must work and how it would have worked in the past. 'I am always curious about a building's history: not just its architectural past, but also who lived there, what its story is,' she explains. 'I think about what I sense when I first walk into a space, and what it would look like with nothing in it, just the light. That is my starting point.'

Ngoc Minh Mgo

In Sussex, Harriet's starting point was a house so inexorably anchored in its rural past that she had to work in sympathy with it, quietly rewiring, re-plumbing and installing central heating, while doing very little to the original layout and structure. 'You really have to listen to a house like this,' she tells me as we cross the stone threshold, worn smooth by the centuries of stomping feet, through the back door and into the scullery, which connects to the kitchen. 'There are no straight lines here, and there is nothing that doesn't have a hole or a chip or a bird in it. But if you spent your time worry-ing about spiders and symmetry, you wouldn't live here.'